DO AS I SAY, DON'T DO AS I DO

We argue a lot as Americans whether we should have invaded Iraq in the first place. We clearly didn’t have reliable intelligence, we should or shouldn’t have believed it, we deposed a hideous tyrant who gassed his own people, but over 2000 American families grieve their lost sons and daughters. We have brought freedom and democracy to Iraqis, but over two million Iraqis have fled to neighboring countries because their own is so unsafe. Happily, we can all agree that the new Iraqi Constitution, recently approved by Iraqis themselves by referendum, is a very good thing indeed. I sat down and read their Constitution to see what kind of a document we’re spending six hundred billion dollars and so many lives to create. You can download the Associated Press translation at http://www.almendhar.com/english_17/print.asx

I was genuinely moved. This is an astonishingly thorough, culturally and tribally sensitive statement of the highest and best aspirations any nation could have for its people and for the best way to conduct government and civic affairs. And when I compared the Iraqi Constitution with our own United States Constitution, some sections frankly made me jealous.

I am particularly interested in children’s rights. I believe that the way a country treats all its children is the best litmus test of how civilized the grown-ups really are. Kids are the future and if you marginalize them, you don’t have the right to expect much of your country in the years to come. So my eyes were opened wide by the sections of the Iraqi Constitution beginning at Article 29: “The family is the foundation of society….the state shall guarantee the protection of motherhood, childhood and old age and shall take care of juveniles and youths and provide them with agreeable conditions to develop their capabilities. Children have the right to upbringing, education and care from their parents; parents have the right to respect and care from their children, especially in times of want, disability or old age. Economic exploitation of children in any form is banned and the state shall take measures to guarantee their protection. Violence and abuse in the family, school and society shall be forbidden. The state guarantees social and health insurance, the basics for a free and honorable life for the individual and the family, especially children and women, works to protect them from illiteracy, fear and poverty and provides them with housing and the means to rehabilitate and take care of them. This shall be regulated by law. Every Iraqi has the right to health service, and the state is in charge of public health and guarantees the means of protection and treatment by building different kinds of hospitals and health institutions”.

Here’s why it made me jealous: the United States ranks last or almost last in the First World by the statistics of childhood abuse and neglect. The Europeans, the Australians, the Japanese and a whole lot of other nations have clearly worked out better ways to protect their children in harm’s way… ways that mostly seem to elude us. We have 3 million kids abused each year and 1200 of them die. Many of the 2,200 jurisdictions that run children’s services for needy kids mess it up big time, and they all have different problems: in Florida they lose children in state custody. Where are those hundreds of children? In several of our major cities there is no institutional memory and they put kids back into the same dangerous place where they are re-molested and sometimes killed by the people who caused them harm in the first place. 68% of adult male prisoners in the United States were abused or neglected as children. 50% of all obese American women were sexually molested in childhood. The direct and indirect costs of abuse and neglect of children exceed a hundred billion dollars a year.

Could this be related to the fact that children seem to have been forgotten by those brilliant men who drafted our Constitution? And could it be that those other brilliant men (and possibly a couple of women) we have sent to Washington ever since have not seen fit to improve matters much at all? The comparison with the Iraqi Constitution is telling: Iraqis think enough of their children to actually list their entitlements to well-being in the Constitution. Our Constitution makes no such commitments. If the Iraqis are willing to write down the protections they offer their children, might they take them a little more seriously when it comes to actually protecting them? Isn’t that one big reason for having a constitution in the first place?

The inescapable truth emerges that we are contributing the six hundred billion dollars and maiming thousands of American soldiers to guarantee protections for Iraqi children which we don’t give our own kids. We don’t guarantee our children healthcare and we don’t obligate our government to work to protect them from poverty: one in five of our children is growing up below the poverty line. Maybe this explains why the infant mortality rate among African American babies in New York is worse than in Cuba? Iraqi children and others are guaranteed the right to live in a healthy environment. There are no such Federal protections in the United States and the result is that many of our kids grow up in environments which are a hazard to their health and to any kind of happy future.

But, but, but I hear you say, will the Iraqis actually enforce these wonderful constitutional rights? Two answers: firstly, we for sure don’t enforce them ourselves and more importantly, the constitution of a nation is the fountainhead of all its jurisprudence, its case law and its evolving set of social standards for minimum behavior by people and companies and by the government itself….there is a clear advantage to writing down human entitlements that are essential to growing up whole and undamaged, rather than simply listing prohibitions. Bear in mind also that we don’t prohibit many of the things that stand in the way of our children’s right to reach adulthood intact as “highest and best” members of the community. Go figure.

I wouldn’t like to go live in Iraq. I would much rather enjoy my life and raise my children in the United States. But that is because I am a prosperous middle class member of the community and I can assure my children have the opportunity to reach their full potential. That is not true of our forty million poor families and of the children they raise….in many cases, their kids would be better off in Iraq.

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Peter Samuelson (petersam@who.net) founded First Star (http://www.firststar.org/ ) the national advocacy organization for child victims of abuse and neglect and Starlight-Starbright (www.slsb.org), the charity that helps seriously ill children. In his civilian life he is a film producer and lives in Los Angeles with his wife and four children.